President Trump diverged from the recommendations of White House Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In an upcoming interview with Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo teased Wednesday, Trump said he disagrees with Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on his recent assertion that allowing schools to reopen in the fall would be “a bridge too far.”
“He said it seems like it could be too soon and that the major message he wants to convey is that the danger is if we skip over the checkpoints and the guidelines to open America again, then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks,” Bartiromo asked Trump.
“So, Anthony is a good person, a very good person, I’ve disagreed with him. When I closed the border to China, he disagreed with that, and then, ultimately, he agreed, said I saved hundreds of thousands of lives, which is what happened. Everybody disagreed when I did that,” Trump began.
“I think that we have to open our schools. Young people are very little affected by this. We have to get the schools open, we have to get our country open, we have to open our country. Now, we want to do it safely, but we also want to do it as quickly as possible, we can’t keep going on like this. You’re going to have — you’re having bedlam already in the streets, you can’t do this. We have to get it open. I totally disagree with him on schools,” Trump said.
During his testimony to the Senate on Tuesday, Fauci expressed reservations about the opening of schools as the coronavirus continues to spread in the country.
“The idea of having treatments available, or a vaccination, to facilitate the reentry of students into the fall term would be something that would be a bit of a bridge too far,” Fauci said in his testimony.
Nearly 4.3 million people have tested positive for the coronavirus globally. Of those, at least 295,000 have died from it, and more than 1.5 million have recovered.
In the United States, there have been at least 1.38 million confirmed coronavirus cases, more than 83,700 deaths, and 243,000 reported recoveries, according to the latest reading of the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
